


Problem Exists Between Needle And Lounge Chair

by jedusaur



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, Tech Support
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-30
Updated: 2011-01-30
Packaged: 2017-10-22 02:55:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/232985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedusaur/pseuds/jedusaur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One aspect of the dreamsharing business that Arthur considers in need of drastic overhaul is its technical support network, or lack thereof.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Problem Exists Between Needle And Lounge Chair

One aspect of the dreamsharing business that Arthur considers in need of drastic overhaul is its technical support network, or lack thereof. He knows the equipment cold when it's working, but when something goes on the fritz, there are exactly two people in the world he can approach for help without getting arrested, and both of them live in New Jersey. It's almost enough to drive him back to college for a degree in computer biochemistry so he can hotwire the thing himself.

"Hotwiring a car means bypassing the ignition," says Jimmy. "There's nothing to bypass in a PASIV device. The problem is that it's malfunctioning, not that you don't have security access to operate it. Your analogy is weak."

This is another reason Arthur wishes he could just do the damn repairs himself.

"It miscalibrated the sedative dosage so badly that my mark nearly died," he says. "It would be great if you could make it not do that anymore."

Jimmy fishes a tiny black plastic cube out of the machinery and picks a Phillips screwdriver out of his set of multitudes to open up a panel on the side. Arthur peers curiously at it, but all he can see is wires. He has a basic grounding in the hard sciences, but only enough to be fairly sure that dreamsharing shouldn't work at all, not enough to understand how it actually does work.

"I'm gonna have to run some tests to nail down where exactly the problem is," says Jimmy. "It'll be a while, if you want to come back later."

There is absolutely nothing in New Jersey that Arthur has any desire to do. "Do you mind if I wait here?"

Jimmy waves at the couch in the corner. "Be my guest. Just shift all that junk onto the coffee table."

Arthur clears off a cushion, examining the papers. They appear to be blueprints. "What are these for?"

"Artificial sensory transduction schematics for intrasomnial recordings."

Arthur's jaw drops. "Really? You can save dreams and play them back?"

"Not yet I can't," Jimmy says. "It'll be another two or three months at the very least before we have a functional prototype ready."

"How does it work?" asks Arthur, and Jimmy doesn't shut up for another hour and a half. Arthur encourages him, asking questions and clarifying concepts, and by the end of the lecture he thinks he understands. There's already an electronic log of the dream kept in the PASIV device for purposes of tracking compound release; Jimmy's invention will translate that log to a screen and speakers, resulting in a file that can be stored and watched like a movie. It's an extractor's wet dream: solid evidence.

"I'm not seeing anything here," says Jimmy eventually. "That means it's a programming issue rather than wiring. You'll have to come back in a few days."

Ted, the only other person in the world who offers PASIV tech support to criminals, comes in the door of the workshop at that moment. He stops dead when he sees Arthur. "Damn it, Jim, you couldn't put these away?" he snaps, whisking away the blueprints.

"Oops," says Jimmy. "Are we not supposed to talk about it?"

Ted drops his face into his hands. "What did you tell him?"

"Don't worry, I barely understood a word," Arthur lies.

Ted shoots him a glare. "Don't even think about trying to steal them," he warns. "I'll know it was you, and you can't afford to burn bridges with us, not with that piece of shit second-generation model falling apart on you every two months."

"I'm not going to steal anything," says Arthur. He doesn't need to. He's already got high-res digital photographs of every sheet.

***

Eames has some impressive bags under his eyes, craggy with wrinkles and dark like bruises.

"You look like a raccoon," Arthur informs him.

They're in Chicago, in a hotel room. Hotels are the best rendezvous points, since it's difficult for potential eavesdroppers to plant bugs if they don't know what room to aim for. Arthur is sitting in an armchair, and Eames is on the floor, propped up against the side of the bed. He looks like he's about to collapse.

"I'm a bit tired," he says. "I've been doing extraction jobs on my own lately."

"What do you mean, on your own?"

"I mean, just me and my trusty drip." Eames points to a PASIV case on the desk. "It takes longer without a team, and it's a lot harder, but things tend to go more smoothly. The plan always changes halfway through anyway. If it's just me, I can handle that. Throw in a pile of other people to keep in the loop and everyone starts panicking at every setback."

"I don't panic," says Arthur.

Eames smiles brightly at him, or as brightly as he can with two black eyes. "That's why you're here. I want to bring you on."

"Just the two of us? That's insane." Arthur thinks about it for a moment. "I can understand doing research and drug dosing yourself, since that's all finished ahead of time, but how do you manage forging and extracting while holding together the dreamscape?"

"I use the mark as the architect," says Eames. "Most people in dreambuilding waste a lot of energy on developing environments the target doesn't recognize. That's the only reason to have one person on the job solely dedicated to active dreaming. They're all going about it inefficiently."

"I have never seen you give any indication that you're even aware of the concept of efficiency," says Arthur.

"That's because you're such a paragon of efficiency that when you're around no one else need bother," says Eames dryly. "Don't be a bitch."

He explains his low-energy-expending architecture methods, and Arthur has to admit that his ideas make sense, if he can pull them off. When the dream is forming, Eames lets the mark lay down the basic ideas of their surroundings. He adds just enough detail to make the world work for his purposes, and doesn't fight changes in the environment unless they create a risk of blowing his cover. With the mark obliviously maintaining the structure of the dreamscape by expectation alone, Eames can hold down the most crucial bits of it while still focusing on the goal of the job.

"You're scaring me a little," says Arthur.

"With my brilliance, or with my idiocy?"

"Yes," Arthur says.

"Don't knock it 'til you've tried it," says Eames. "So are you in?"

Arthur wants to hear more details about the job, but the truth is he's so curious about how this will work that the details don't really matter. He knows that Eames' judgment is sound when it comes to accepting jobs. "I'm in," he says.

Ten minutes later, he's regretting not asking questions first.

"Wait," he protests, "why am I the one who has to seduce the mark?"

"Because I'm the one who knows how to pull off a convincing woman," says Eames. "The point here is to find out whether he's gay. That's what the client wants to know. To do that, we give him a choice between a sexy woman and a sexy man."

Arthur doesn't address the compliment. He knows he's attractive, in the same objective asset-inventory sense that he knows he's a good shot. "Why do we need to give him a choice? If he's willing to be seduced by a man, then he's not straight, regardless of whether he has other options."

"Look," Eames says, "this isn't a difficult job. I'm using this one to show you how my dreamscaping methods work. To accomplish that, you're going to need to actually interact with him. Unless you have a problem with shagging the mark?"

Arthur isn't going to back down from that. "Are you sure I'm his type?"

"Oh, you're everyone's--" Eames starts, but a cool look turns him serious. "I've done the research. You'll do fine, assuming you're capable of flirting."

Arthur ignores the bait. "If you've done the research, why do you need me? Research is what I do."

"Because," says Eames, "no one worth their salt in this business is just one thing. I want to give you a chance to find out what else you can do."

***

Arthur has never seen this many attractive people sweating this much in the same place before. He slings a towel over his shoulder and wanders past a row of elliptical machines, dodging a pair of extremely large breasts spilling out of a woefully inadequate sports bra.

He doesn't normally pay much attention to dream architecture anymore, since he makes it a rule to only work with architects who are good enough that he doesn't have to keep an eye on them. Now, with this new dreambuilding strategy, he examines every detail of the scene. He can't find any obvious flaws, but he didn't expect to. Eames is making a point with this job: he knows what he's talking about.

Arthur spots the mark lifting weights in a corner. Aware that good impressions are crucial to this endeavor, he does not embarrass himself by attempting to do likewise. Instead, he plays to his strengths, folding his body down to the floor nearby and stretching out his legs languidly.

The mark is definitely peeking. Arthur tilts his head forward, wrapping a hand around the arch of his foot, and smiles up through his lashes. The mark smiles back.

This is going to be easy.

The woman with the massive chest settles into a rowing machine on the mark's other side. She's probably Eames. Arthur ignores her and continues with the warm-up routine until the mark finishes his set. When he sees the weights hit the bench, Arthur gets to his feet and heads for the locker room, tossing a quick glance behind him to be sure the invitation is received. Eames is trying to chat him up, but the mark is ignoring the breasts in his face, eyes still on Arthur.

The locker room is unrealistically empty, matching up with the expectations of the unwitting dreamer. Arthur is alone for less than a minute before he shows up. "Hey," he says, sidling up to Arthur. "I'm Matt."

The guy's really not playing hard to get, so Arthur doesn't bother engaging him in small talk. "That's nice," he says. "Suck me off and I'll let you fuck me."

Without hesitation, Matt drops to his knees. Arthur allows the smirk to show on his face. Mission accomplished.

***

The flight to Boston is abnormally calm, with no squalling babies or overly talkative seatmates. The flight attendants make the same stupid jokes they always make, and the pilot gets on the intercom for five seconds to talk about the seatbelt sign, but really to reassure the passengers in a ludicrously Southern accent that there's someone at the wheel.

Arthur braves the public transit system to get back to his apartment. He gets to the subway station a few seconds too late, as usual, and has to wait fifteen minutes for another Red Line train. By the time he gets home, he's ready to fall into bed and sleep for twelve hours straight.

This plan fails to account for Ted accosting him in his living room.

"Jesus fuck," Arthur says, more startled than anything. "What are you doing here?"

"The plans," says Ted. Arthur opens his mouth, but he barrels on. "No, hold on, before you start digging yourself into holes insisting you don't have them, just hear me out. Jim's a dipshit, dropped a cigarette and burned down the coffee table and half the blueprints. We've got an electronic version, but my notes were on the hard copies. That's three weeks of calculations, gone. I know you scanned them, you'd have been an idiot not to. I need them, okay?"

Arthur really doesn't want to deal with this shit right now.

"Come on," says Ted. "You want access to this technology. You'd only be shooting yourself in the foot."

"Fine," says Arthur. He pulls open his bottom desk drawer and unlocks his safe. "Here." He pulls out the prints he made of the images.

Ted glances them over and looks up. "Yeah, that's them all right," he says. He raises a gun he wasn't holding half a second ago and pulls the trigger.

Arthur jumps to his feet. He's back in the hotel room in Chicago. Matt, whose name almost certainly isn't Matt, is packing up the PASIV at lightning speed.

"Oh shit, he's awake," he says. "I'm gone." He scampers out the door with the PASIV in its metal case, glancing over his shoulder as if he expects Arthur to start shooting at his back. This is ridiculous, since Arthur's gun is gone and probably-not-Matt, being half of the kidnapping crew, must know that.

Arthur sits back down on the bed and glares at Eames, who's still sprawled out on the other bed. "Are you going to explain what's going on?"

"I'm rather curious to know how much you've figured out on your own, actually," Eames admits.

Arthur considers the past few hours in the light of this new development. "Clearly, the job was a front for getting your hands on the blueprints. Ted must have been you as a forgery, as well as your friend the ostensible mark. I'm guessing the gym was his work, while the first level was yours."

"Yours, actually," corrects Eames, implicitly confirming the rest of Arthur's deductions. "I wasn't lying about my innovative architectural ideas. Excellent job with the plane flight, by the way."

"So your friend stayed in the first level, which I thought was the real world, and pretended to be asleep while actually maintaining the structure of that layer. You and I went down to the second layer, where you forged the mark. The woman I thought was you must have been a projection."

Eames nods encouragingly. Arthur continues, "We completed the fake job, I woke up into the first layer, and you forged Ted to get me to give up the documents. You couldn't have memorized anything useful in the amount of time you spent looking at them, and if you had dream recording technology the blueprints wouldn't have been necessary, so the goal must have been just to find out that I had them... oh. Ted hired you to find out whether I'd made copies after he caught me with them, didn't he?"

"Well done." Eames is grinning, almost proudly.

"One question," says Arthur. "Why the sex?"

Eames shrugs. "Had to do something down there to convince you the job was legit. Figured I might as well enjoy myself. It wasn't like I had a prayer of getting in your pants in the real world, was it?"

"No, it wasn't," says Arthur. "You might now, though."

Eames cocks an eyebrow. "Beg pardon?"

"Well, not _right_ now," Arthur concedes. "At the moment, I'm annoyed and embarrassed, not really in the mood. But I do tend to be attracted to competence, and you've just demonstrated that. You've also just demonstrated that you're an excellent lay, which is another point in your favor. You should be able to get me in bed if you try when I'm not struggling to hold myself back from strangling you."

"Thanks for the tip," says Eames, looking a bit taken aback.

"You're welcome," says Arthur. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to work on finding a new source of PASIV tech support, since I'm clearly in the doghouse with mine."

"I'm pretty handy with these glorified syringes," Eames says. "What's gone wrong?"

Arthur explains about the dose calibration problem and Jimmy's diagnosis of a programming error, which leads him to veer off into a rant about Ted's numerous personal failures. He barely notices Eames extricating his moleskine from his briefcase and flipping through it until Eames says, "You've made a mistake in the weight conversions."

Arthur pauses. "What?"

"Converting between pounds and kilograms, here. You're meant to multiply, not divide."

Arthur snatches back the book and examines the page. "He didn't," he breathes, more in astonishment than denial. The conversions aren't in his handwriting. Kramer, his chemist on the last job, must have written them directly in. Sure enough, it's a simple math error, one Arthur would have seen in an instant if he'd double-checked. It easily explains the dosage mixup.

Eames is grinning widely. "Listen, I wasn't joking about teaming up. You can't trust me to be honest, but you can trust me not to fuck up. I even come with my own..." He glances at the empty bedside table in surprise. "Did he bugger off with my machine?"

"You didn't notice?" Arthur asks incredulously. "And you're telling me I can trust you not to fuck up?"

Eames shrugs, unconcerned. "In my defense, you have a very distracting arse."

***

Of course they're in the middle of a firefight when the mark starts waking up. One moment she's shooting more projections than Eames is, the next she's flat on the cement, gun forgotten and eyes wide.

"She's not getting enough sedative," Arthur mutters urgently to Eames. "I'll head back up and see if I can figure out what's wrong." He blows his head off, after giving his totem a cursory squeeze to be sure he's not actually blowing his head off.

He's only awake for a few seconds before Eames sits up, too. "She's down there alone?" Arthur demands.

"She's fine," Eames says dismissively. "She's the dream architect and the projections won't find her where I left her. Look, the needle's dislodged." He moves the mark's hand back onto the arm of the chair from where it's fallen to one side. The crook of her elbow is a little swollen from where the sedative has been injected into her tissue instead of her bloodstream.

"Hypnic jerk, I'm betting," says Arthur. "Her veins were a motherfucker to find, wouldn't have taken much to pull it out. Good thing you saw it, I didn't even notice her arm had moved."

Eames grins as he slides the needle back into place. "This is why you need me around, see?" he says smugly. "First rule of tech support: check that it's plugged in."


End file.
